CHAPTER 2
THE STORY OF THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
When did consciousness first appear?
Some say consciousness was there at the beginning, and exists throughout the universe. Physicist Freeman Dyson, describing the mysterious discoveries of quantum physics, writes “[a]toms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom.”[i] In contrast, others like psychologist Susan Blackmore and philosopher Paul Churchland advise us to be realistic and face the fact that consciousness does not really exist anywhere, that it is nothing more than a word that describes a particular activity of the brain. Apart from these two extremes, most scientists agree that consciousness does in fact exist, but disagree about when it first appeared.[1] In the last decade, as scientists have had access to more sophisticated tools for investigating intelligence, it has become possible to detect intelligent behavior much earlier in the evolutionary chain.
According to Anthony Trewavas, professor of biology at the University of Edinburgh, “plants have senses and can detect a wide variety of external variables, such as light, water, temperature, chemicals, vibrations, gravity, and sounds. They can also react to these factors by changing the way they grow. Plants can forage and compete with one another for resources. When attacked by herbivores, some plants signal for help, releasing chemicals that attract their assailants’ predators. Plants can detect distress signals let off by other plant species and take preventive measures. They can assimilate information and respond on the whole-plant level. And they use cell-to-cell communication based on molecular and electrical signals, some of which are remarkably similar to those used by our own neurons. When a plant is damaged, its cells send one another electrical signals just like our own pain messages.”[ii]
Trewavas does not claim that plants can think or have anything resembling human self-awareness. However, he does consider these facts about plants to be a clear demonstration that they are sentient and respond intelligently to what they sense.
Toshiyuki Nakagaki is an associate professor of biology at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. In articles such as Amoeboid Organisms May Be More Clever Than We Had Thought, Nakagaki describes some remarkable abilities in the organism known as the “true slime mold” – a creature formed by the merging together of thousands of amoebae into a single cell. Though it does not have eyes or a nervous system, it is able to “move, navigate and avoid obstacles. [It] can also sense food at a distance and head unerringly toward it.”[iii]
When researchers place separate pieces of a true slime mold into a maze, the pieces rejoin to form a single organism that spreads out into every corridor of the maze, covering all the available space. “[W]hen food is placed at the start and end points of the maze, the slime mold withdraws from the dead-end corridors and shrinks its body to a tube spanning the shortest path between food sources …[and it] solves the maze in this way each time it is tested.” Nakagaki and his collaborators conclude “[t]his remarkable process of cellular computation implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence.” [iv]
Some may be reluctant to consider the possibility that the activity of such primitive organisms reflects any kind of conscious intelligence. If, however, one is willing to concede that a shrub or slime mold possesses some form of intelligence, it seems hard to dispute that it is probably less complex than that of a snowy owl or a South American sea lion. Nevertheless, the idea that consciousness has somehow grown in complexity over the course of evolution continues to be very controversial.
Does Consciousness Become More Complex Over the Course of Evolution?
Some scientists who dispute the notion of a hierarchy of consciousness suggest that adaptability should be the main measure of intelligence. According to this line of thought, a frog’s intelligence is no less than a human’s, since a frog’s intelligence helps it adapt to its environment equally as well as our human intelligence helps us adapt to ours. Such scientists might suggest, for example, that human beings would be hard-pressed to live on lily-pads and subsist on a diet of whatever flies we could catch with our tongues. But is adaptability the same as intelligence? Neuropsychologist Merlin Donald points out that if we use the criterion of adaptability, one might say “corporate CEO’s are no more or less intelligent in an adaptive biological sense than, say, maggots, a conclusion that may have a certain emotional resonance for many, but falls a bit short on the evidence.”[v]
There is another, more powerful reason for resistance to the idea that consciousness has become more complex. Many scientists are concerned that even the suggestion of some kind of directionality in evolution might open a door through which religious dogma could enter and distort their objective findings. However, as we see from the work of those like Trewavas and Nakagaki, it is possible to pursue these questions in a rigorous scientific manner.
Some who object to the idea of directionality suggest that if we look at the course of evolution over several thousand or even several million years, it appears as though changes in intelligence have occurred in many directions rather than as a straightforward increase in complexity. However, physicist and theologian Ian Barbour suggests that if we take the long view, “evolutionary history shows an overall trend toward greater complexity, responsiveness and awareness. The capacity of organisms to gather, store and process information has steadily increased.” [vi]
Recent studies in developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shown that there is a remarkable parallel between the increasing complexity of consciousness over the course of evolution and the way in which it unfolds over shorter timeframes. As Harvard neuroscientist J. Allan Hobson describes it, “Consciousness is graded across evolutionary time, over the course of development, and even continuously from moment to moment.”[vii] Hobson himself has described the emerging complexity of consciousness over the time span of billions of years. Developmental psychologists such as Susan Harter and John Flavell have tracked a similar emergence over the course of a human lifetime. Francisco Varela, Brian Lancaster and other cognitive neuroscientists suggest that a comparable progression of consciousness unfolds in each moment of human experience.
In the sections that follow, we will describe what science has discovered about the increasing complexity of consciousness as it unfolds over these three different time frames. [2] We will do this in terms of three categories – knowing (cognition), feeling (affect) and willing (volition). Many centuries ago, Aristotle used these categories to encompass the full range of conscious activities. While many ways of describing consciousness have since been developed, cognitive scientists continue to use a framework which is essentially the same as the one used by Aristotle.[viii] For the present, we’ll define knowing as the capacity for registering and (to a lesser or greater degree) comprehending distinctions in the environment; feeling as the largely physiological responses that accompany acts of knowing and willing; and willing as the active response to what is known and felt.[3]
The Emergence of Consciousness in Animals over the Course of Evolution
As consciousness evolves, the organism becomes capable of distinguishing more of the world. That is, it knows more of the world, has a wider range of feeling about it, and a wider array of responses to it. This progression ranges from the slime mold’s extremely limited registration of external stimuli, to the sea anemone’s ability to recognize distinguishable patterns, the bee’s capacity to “understand” some simple relationships between those patterns, the lizard’s ability to define a particular territory, and the crow’s capacity to engage in complex problem-solving within and around its territory.
Whatever the nature of the primitive intelligence Nakagaki identified in a single-celled organism, the way in which it experiences the world would be unimaginable to us. What kind of consciousness could one possibly ascribe to such a primitive creature? At best, we might imagine its experience to be little more than the faintest blur. It has no sense organs, yet is able in some way to detect the presence of food, indicating it has a primitive “knowing” of its environment. The fact that it was able to determine that the substance was desirable is thought to indicate the presence of a primitive form of “feeling.” Its response to the food – arranging itself to optimally obtain it – reflects a primitive form of “willing.”
What began as a faint glimmer of knowing in the most primitive creatures was greatly enhanced in early multi-cellular organisms by the emergence of primitive sense organs. The dim blurry world of the true slime mold became a world of distinguishable patterns. The senses of a sea anemone living in a rock pool, for example, are stimulated by certain patterns in its environment. In response to these patterns the anemone registers a “feeling” – slightly more differentiated than in the slime mold – that is positive, negative or neutral depending on whether the pattern is perceived as friendly, unfriendly or irrelevant to its survival. If the pattern signifies food, in a primitive act of “will” it will grab at it; if it signifies a threat, it will attack or retreat. These responses are even subject to a primitive form of learning known as habituation. For example, if you gently tap a tentacle, the anemone will initially withdraw. If however, repeated taps prove to be harmless, it will cease to respond.
In multi-cellular creatures, the specialized sensory cells developed into sense organs. A primitive nervous system emerged which could coordinate the information taken in by the various senses and a more complex external world of hue and shape began to emerge on the canvas of consciousness. The more complex capacities for knowing, willing and feeling that accompanied these changes are evident in the “waggle dance” ritual of the honeybee.
In the course of its search for nourishment, when a bee sees a patch of flowers that promises to be a rich source of nutrients, it will retrace its route several times in order to memorize the location. Returning to the hive, it performs a complex series of movements that has come to be known as the “waggle dance.” Moving in the form of a figure eight, “its orientation indicates the direction of [the] find relative to the position of the sun. The speed of her movement, the number of times she repeats it, and the fervor of her noisy waggling indicate the richness of the food source.”[ix] The observing bees assess the intensity of her movements and thus discern the relative value of her find.
In this ritual, the bees demonstrate several acts of knowing which include judgment, memory, and the performance of some fairly complex calculations. Both the ability of the dancing bee to perform her highly detailed movements, and the concentration required of her audience, indicate a more highly developed capacity for willing than that of either the sea anemone or slime mold. Scientists have not yet developed techniques or technology for distinguishing levels of complexity of feeling between creatures as primitive as the slime mold, sea anemone and bee. However, assuming that consciousness evolves in an integral fashion, it seems likely that whatever level of feeling is present is to some extent commensurate with the bees’ capacity for knowing and willing.
Though impressive, this ritual dance is largely instinctive. The bees’ capacity for learning is limited, and their response patterns can be quite inflexible. For example, “if placed in a maze with a glass cover, they perform as well as rats up to the point of reaching the food reward, but they are incapable of turning around and going back to where they have come from. Once bees eat, they are rigidly programmed to fly upward,”[x] and will thus remain trapped in the maze.
With the appearance of reptiles, we see a further development of knowing, willing and feeling. The reptile can process sensory information in more complex ways than either the sea anemone or bee. A lizard, for example, can “understand” the notion of territory, and engage in behaviors such as defining, patrolling and defending that territory against trespassers. The world it experiences is somewhat richer by virtue of the primitive feelings of safety, anger, fear and competitiveness associated with its knowing of a territory, and its activities related to that knowing. While these behaviors are instinctive and automatic, the lizard’s larger repertoire of responses represents a further complexity of will.
With the appearance of mammals and birds, we see the emergence of more complex abilities for learning, memory and problem solving. While many may have observed these capacities in such familiar mammals as dogs, cats, or the neighborhood raccoon, it may be surprising to hear the extent to which birds demonstrate them as well. Several newspapers and magazines have recently carried the story of Japanese carrion crows who congregate at traffic intersections waiting for a red light. When the traffic stops, the crows fly down to the road to place walnuts they’ve gathered in front of the cars. When the light turns green, the cars move forward, cracking open the nuts. When the road is clear, the crows return to enjoy the feast.[xi]
Perhaps less well known is the astonishing memory of one particular species of crow, the Clark’s nutracker, who can remember as many as 30,000 hiding places for the seeds it gathers and buries. After burying the seeds, he then recovers them over the course of the next 11 months, using them as his primary diet during the winter.[xii]
With mammals and birds, as opposed to more primitive organisms, it becomes much easier to observe emotional reactions. However, it is quite unusual to find an animal that can verbally articulate his feelings. Alex, an African Grey parrot trained for over 20 years by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, has a vocabulary of more than 100 words. As familiar as Dr. Pepperberg was with Alex’s abilities, even she was startled one day when she dropped him off for an overnight stay at a veterinary hospital to have lung surgery. Apparently upset at being left in a strange place, Alex called to her as she was leaving, “Come here. I love you… Wanna go back.”[xiii]
With primates came the ability to make use of more complex symbols, making possible a simple form of reasoning. For example, a chimp, spotting a banana outside his cage just beyond arm’s reach, can conjure up the image of a stick and think about how he might use it to retrieve the banana. This capacity freed primates from adherence to rigid instinctive behaviors, allowing for innovation and a far greater degree of flexibility in coping with new situations. The ability to use symbols also allowed for a new form of communication – that of symbolic language.
While chimpanzees and gorillas may not be able to speak as we do, it is for want of a larynx, rather than a deficiency of their brains. The world-renowned and much beloved gorilla, Koko, was taught the deaf sign language and showed a remarkable ability to use it to communicate.[xiv] She now has a vocabulary of more than a thousand words, and is able to compose simple sentences. Her ability to make use of symbolic language gives her a greater capacity than reptiles and most mammals to comprehend the relationship between herself and the things and creatures of her environment. This makes it possible for Koko to have a more highly developed social life, with more complex familial and other interpersonal ties. These more intimate relationships bring the possibility of deeper, more complex emotional feelings and responses. They also facilitate the passing on of social norms to a new generation, giving birth to the possibility of culture.[xv]
With the appearance of human beings something radically new began to emerge – the sense of an individual self with a past, present and future, and the capacity to be aware of and reflect upon the nature of that self. We’ve moved from the blurry inchoate world of the amoeba to a highly differentiated world of multi-dimensional relationships – between past, present and future, and between an individual and his environment. With a greatly enhanced capacity for memory, analysis, and strategic planning, human beings can arrive at complex theories for making sense of their world. We’ve graduated from simple feeling responses of pleasure and pain to the complexities of romantic love, self-sacrifice, compassion and remorse. And along with the capacity for self-awareness has come the power to change ourselves and reshape our environment.
The Emergence of Consciousness over the Lifetime of an Individual
Overview
Whatever scientists have learned about intelligence and sentience in animals has been the result of inference rather than direct experience. Because current scientific methodology offers no way of knowing directly the subjective experience of the slime mold or the crow, the nature of their consciousness has been inferred from careful observation of behavior. When we turn to the study of human consciousness, researchers have the benefit of a self-conscious subject whose consciousness is similar to their own, and who can report on their own subjective experience. Even in the study of pre-verbal children, the researcher has the advantage of having once been a child herself, and can bring that tacit knowledge to her interpretation of experimental data. Because of this, there is a richness to the language and content of theories of human development that is not possible in the study of animal consciousness.
Jean Piaget is perhaps the name most widely associated with theories of development. Though many of his ideas have been widely critiqued and in some cases replaced, one of his core principles – that the center of attention shifts over the course of development – has endured as a central idea in developmental theory.[xvi] To put it simply, the infant’s attention is completely absorbed in her sensations and the movements of her body, but she does not know they are her sensations or her body. “The newborn makes no distinction between inner and outer, between stimuli that come from her own body (for example, hunger) and those that come from outside (light), between your hand passing across her eyes and her own hand passing across her eyes.”[xvii] For the newborn infant, light, hunger and hands are simply sensations belonging to one, undifferentiated world, indistinguishable from herself.
By sometime late in the first year, a momentous change takes place. The infant is no longer wholly identified with these sensations and body movements; she is someone who has a body and experiences sensations. What has happened? The attention that was wholly absorbed in the body has become at least partially disidentified from it. The growing infant’s attention shifts and becomes absorbed in the various desires and impulses that are now growing stronger. Over the course of time, she will once again be able to step back and realize (at least to some extent) that she has desires and impulses. Once she does this, rather than being wholly subject to them, she can make these desires and impulses the object of her attention and gradually learn to control them. This process of disidentification continues throughout life as the adolescent learns to detach from her feelings, and the adult from her thoughts and ideas about herself and the world.
While this may sound like a simple, uncomplicated process, development is actually a complex dance of shifting attention in which the growing individual explores new ways of knowing, willing and feeling. It is true that early development – from birth to about age four or five – is generally considered to be predictable, determined at least to some extent by relatively fixed genetic tendencies. However, as the child grows older, cultural influences as well as the individual’s evolving intentions and goals play an increasingly important role, providing for a great degree of unpredictability in the developmental process.
We now look in more detail at several important shifts of attention which take place in the course of development. As we do so, we’ll see, as we did with biological evolution, how the processes of knowing, willing and feeling – the ways in which the individual attends to herself and the world - become more complex.
Infant Development
A human infant at birth cannot willfully direct her attention. She lives in an amorphous world of colors, shapes and sounds from which she cannot distinguish her “self.” Her world is pervaded by simple feeling states such as calm, excitement, or distress. Within the first few months of life, she will acquire the capacity to organize her somewhat chaotic sensations into perceptions, enabling her to recognize more distinct, but still ephemeral shapes and forms that exist, then cease to exist, as they enter or leave her field of vision.
There is an experiment which beautifully illustrates the transition from this early stage of “selflessness”[4] to the emergence of a distinct “self.” A researcher gives a ball to a four month-old baby, who engages with the toy, “…pursuing it with eyes and hands, holding it, bringing it to his mouth.” The ball is then covered, and the infant seems not to notice. The experimenter removes the cover and, “the child lights up, vocalizes, reaches again for the object.”[xviii] Psychologist Robert Kegan observes, “It seems not that the child loses interest in the covered object, but that the covered object loses its existence for the child. Between the ages of eight and ten months, the same children begin to make tentative steps to [recover the hidden object].”[xix] However, when the experimenter foils this attempt by placing two or more screens between the infant and the object, his “exploration … comes to an early halt.”[xx]
By the time the child is two years old, he generally has no problem retrieving the hidden ball no matter how well it is hidden. Kegan points out that people hearing of this for the first time think of it as involving two entities – a baby, and a ball. However,
[the experiment] takes on a whole new life if one sees that a single dynamic organism, “baby-and-ball,” is gradually undergoing a process of transformation. Over the period roughly from nine to twenty-one months, the baby-and-ball begins to be something other than a single entity, but does not quite constitute, as yet, two distinct entities. Although the hidden object is not immediately given up, its pursuit is easily defeated. One has the sense of a differentiation so fragile, so tentative, that it can very easily merge back into oneness…In the early months [when the experimenter takes away the ball and covers it] the child gives it up without protest of any kind. He does not, it seems clear, have it, in the sense of its being something apart from [him].[xxi]
With age, the child not only refines his physical ability to grasp the ball, but his psychological ability to ‘grasp’ it as well:
[The experiment] is capturing a motion, the motion of differentiation – which creates the object – and the motion of integration – which creates [the baby’s relationship with and independent existence from] the object.[xxii]
As his attention is freed from the unity of baby-and-ball, the child becomes capable of knowing the ball as separate from himself, having feelings toward it, and choosing how to engage with it. This momentous shift of attention, giving birth to a new self and a new world, is the crux of all transformational processes.
It is as if the newborn infant is living in a forest, aware only of the blur of shifting colors, shapes, sounds and movements. Over many months of constant interaction with different facets of her experience, she slowly learns to focus and stabilize her attention, thus beginning to distinguish different aspects of the forest. Here and there, a tree, a leaf, a flower, tentatively emerges out of the general blur – though not yet known as “tree,” “leaf” or “flower.” With this emergence, she too becomes more distinct. And, over time, an environment separate from herself comes into being.
By the time the child is two or three years old, his sense of self has become more defined, and he begins to perceive himself as an entity with various attributes – “my” toys, “my” parents, “my” home. His simple responses of pleasure and pain are elaborated into more complex emotions such as desire and craving, anger and fear, directed toward the things of the now separate world. He comes to understand that words and images can be used as symbols of something else, opening up a world of new possibilities. He can think about his parents after they leave the room, imagine how they look and act in their absence, hear their voices in his mind. He also can begin to hold a mental image of himself – a significant step in the emergence of a self-reflective, conscious self.
However, such a fully conscious self is still many years away. The capacity of a toddler to sustain attention is fragile at best, and both his self and his world are correspondingly fluid and changeable. His attention is easily caught by each passing impulse or desire. Unable to shift attention, the child’s desires become imperative, demanding immediate satisfaction. The pain of being so completely subject to one’s desires was vividly portrayed in an interaction we witnessed in a city park one afternoon between a four year-old girl and her mother. As the mother looked on helplessly, the little girl, oblivious to everything around her, tears streaming down her face, stamped her foot repeatedly and screamed, “I WANT IT NOW! I WANT IT NOW!”
It is difficult for anyone to see a child in that kind of pain. However, we can remind ourselves that, if the child’s attention were suddenly to be drawn to the sight of a colorful balloon flying overhead, the imperative need to satisfy her previous desire might rapidly dissolve.
Because desires and impulses are so changeable and fleeting, the self caught up in them is similarly transitory. As a new, more stable attentional balance develops, the self and its experienced world grow more stable. Describing the momentous shift of attention that usually takes place somewhere between the ages of 5 and 7, Kegan writes:
1) Children on the early side of the 5 to 7 shift seem to need rewards which are fairly immediate, sensual and communicating of praise; children on the other side seem to be more rewarded by the information that they have been correct. 2) Children who lose a limb or become blind before they are through the shift tend not to have phantom limb responses or memories of sight; children on the other side of the shift do.[xxiii]
The fluid, changeable self of the 3 or 4 year-old child is not stable enough to consistently restrain its impulses, nor is it stable enough to retain the memory of sight or the sensation of a missing limb. By age seven, there is
…a more [enduring] self – a self which does its own praising… A self which can store memories, feelings and perceptions… so that a feeling arm or a seeing eye lives on in some way.[xxiv]
To return to the forest metaphor, the child is now able to see that the trees are part of a larger category – the forest. His development beyond this point will continue to involve learning to free his attention from its absorption in sensations, impulses, and desires, and it will further involve stepping back from the increasingly complex feelings, thoughts and intentions which later emerge. He will learn to observe the “forest” of his experience with a greater detachment, but at the same time with a greater feeling of connectedness to its various trees, leaves and flowers. This increased freedom of attention not only brings greater capacities of knowledge and feeling, but also a wider range of action. Eventually, having traversed the length and breadth of the forest, he learns that he can leave the forest, journey to other forests, and even find altogether new landscapes.
Adolescent and Adult Development
In the course of development, attention can get caught in many ways, and by many things. However, for most people, the most troublesome entanglement involves their emotions. Jason is a fifteen-year-old white, Irish Catholic boy who lives in a large city in northwestern Canada. Among his friends are Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and Protestants, and he shares their open-minded views toward religion. Shortly after he turns 16, his family moves to a small rural town, where all non-Christians are considered heathens destined for hell. Within weeks after beginning school, Jason has adopted the views of his new schoolmates, even to the extent of speaking with scorn of his multi-faith city friends. Toward the end of the school year, Yusef, a friend from his hometown who is a devout Muslim, comes to visit.
Viewed externally, one might say Jason was an opportunist or hypocrite, consciously espousing a particular view only for the sake of being accepted by his peers. However, Jason’s sense of self was so bound up with his need to be accepted, that he was hardly even aware of the conflict between his previous and current views. Yusef’s arrival forced that conflict to the forefront of his consciousness, making him painfully aware of the way he betrayed his values in order to fit in.
In order to resolve this developmental conflict, Jason will need to be able to stay with these painful feelings rather than struggling with or trying to deny them. The simple act of being present with his experience would in itself lessen his identification with the desire to be accepted by his peers. He would thus be able to see his behavior and attitude as something he had temporarily taken on, rather than an essential aspect of himself. Once having achieved this degree of disidentification, he might even have some difficulty recognizing himself in the person who was so desperately needing to fit in with his peers.
With increasing globalization, groups with conflicting values and worldviews encounter each other more frequently than ever before. As a consequence, we are all being faced with the same developmental challenge that confronted Jason – the need to step back from our identification with any particular group. The current state of the world might be likened to a giant schoolyard inhabited by various gangs, each demanding the allegiance of its members and, at the same time, providing them with an identity to which they are attached. Because the existence of other views stands to threaten that identity, each gang vigorously, often violently, asserts its own views and ways of doing things as superior, attempting to bully other groups into giving up their “inferior,” alien lifestyles in favor of its own.
Learning to step back from the beliefs, customs, desires, etc. with which we identity continues to be the quintessential developmental challenge in adulthood. It seems the global conflict in the world today is calling upon us to free ourselves from identification with our respective groups – be they religious, political, national or economic – so that we can see and be responsive to the whole of humanity.
The Emergence of Consciousness in Each Moment
The gradual unfoldment of cognitive, emotional and volitional capacities that took place over the course of terrestrial history is repeated over the course of each individual human lifetime. The emergence of consciousness appears to be similarly graded in every moment of our experience as well.[xxv]
In each moment, there are overlapping strands of experience emerging into conscious awareness. And each one of these strands moves through a non-linear continuum: from unconscious to pre-conscious status, to what William James calls “fringe” experience[xxvi] eventually emerging into full consciousness. Each arc of experience bears the imprint of our entire evolutionary past as well as our entire lifetime. Yet, at the same time, according to recent research in cognitive science,[xxvii] each moment contains the possibility of freedom from that past. Whether we repeat the patterns of our personal and ancestral history, or shift the course of our development, seems to depend – at least to some extent – on what we do with our attention in each moment.
The unconscious[5] processing that precedes a moment[6] of conscious awareness in the human adult resembles the workings of consciousness seen in the earliest stages of evolution and the earliest stage of human infancy:
1) initially, there is a simple registration of a sound, light or other vibration by the senses (knowing), accompanied by a primitive feeling tone (feeling) and an initial reaction of attraction or aversion (willing); 2) this simple experience is elaborated, with memories, associations, and beliefs coming into play, further shaping the interpretation of the stimulus, giving it richer meaning. 3) more conscious and complex feelings and intentions gradually come into play; 4) finally, a “self” is constructed in relation to the event, and emerges – in conjunction with the feelings, intentions and interpretation of the event – into conscious awareness.[7]
The “self” is thus not a fixed entity, but is reconstructed in each moment of experience. Similarly, the “world” is constructed anew in each moment as well. The world we experience is not a direct perception of something “out there.” It is rather a virtual world, an internal construct updated each moment according to new sensory data, filtered through past conditioning, organized and interpreted by the self, and shaped by that to which its attention is drawn. The entire evolutionary spiral of increasing complexity of consciousness, the whole lifetime journey from fetus to adult, emerges in hardly more than an instant of experience.
To get a sense of experience emerging out of the “unconscious”[8] into conscious awareness, you might notice that just a moment ago, the feel of the surface on which you are sitting was probably in the background, emerging into full awareness only as you read these words and directed your attention to the relevant sensations. Yet the whole time, your brain was processing sensory data regarding the contact of your body with the chair. Similarly, the ticking of a clock, the whirring of a fan, the hum of a computer, are sounds that often remain in the background of awareness, tending to emerge only in rare moments, most often when they change in some way. Though they seem to emerge suddenly, in retrospect you may be able to recall a partial awareness of such sounds in the moment just before they became fully conscious.
It is possible to refine our attention to the point that we can actually perceive the process by which each moment of awareness is constructed. Cultivating this level of refinement provides us with the means to bring about a radical transformation of our experience.
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Science has gathered a great deal of information over the past century regarding the unfolding of consciousness in evolution, in human development, and in the course of a single moment. How we view this information, the way in which we understand it, will have a profound impact on our sense of ourselves and the world. Let’s look at the view which has come to be associated with these scientific findings – a view which, whether we realize it or not, informs much of the way we think and feel about all that we experience.
[1] There is a wide range of positions amongst scientists regarding the nature of consciousness. For example, some, like Trewavas and Nakagaki, who see evidence of the workings of intelligence in one-celled organisms, might not see this as evidence that a paramecium or pomegranate has any kind of subjective experience (i.e., feelings). On the other hand, there are some (e.g., psychologist Harry Hunt) who believe there is evidence for subjectivity even in primitive organisms. There are very few who would assert that either intelligence or subjective experience is anything more than a complex working of matter. In this chapter, we’re using the word “consciousness” to include both subjective experience and intelligence. For now, the term is intended to be entirely neutral with regard to whether or not consciousness can be explained as a purely material phenomenon.
[2] It is important to keep in mind as we present the scientific evidence of the increasing complexity of consciousness, that it is all based upon speculation derived from observation of external behavior and, in some cases, similarities between human and animal brain structure or function. Scientists have had no direct experience of the consciousness of these creatures (or, if they do, they don’t acknowledge it in mainstream academic journals).
[3] These definitions, along with the rest of the information provided in this chapter, are stated in terms acceptable within the prevailing scientific perspective. We will give an understanding of knowing, willing and feeling in terms of yoga psychology later in the book.
[4] A “selflessness” which could alternatively be described as “self-embedded-in-world.”
[5] “Unconscious,” that is, from the perspective of the view from nowhere.
[6] In later chapters, we will be making further distinctions in the way this process unfolds.
[7] We describe it here in a linear fashion but it actually takes place in as a series of overlapping strands.
[8] We use quotations for the word “unconscious” because, as we’ll see later – from the perspective of the view from infinity – there is nothing that is wholly “unconscious.”
Book I, Chapter 2, The Story of the Evolution of Consciousness (page numbers)
[i] Dyson, F., Gifford Lectures, at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson.
[ii] Darby, J., Intelligence in Nature, pp. 83-84.
[iii] Ibid., p. 96.
[iv] Ibid., p. 96.
[v] Donald, M., A Mind So Rare, p. 114.
[vi] Barbour, I., When Religion Meets Science, p. 111.
[vii] Hobson, A., Consciousness, p. 223.
[viii] In the 18th century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant declared “knowing, willing and feeling” to be the fundamental components of the mind. Philosopher Charles Pierce, following Kant, described the “triad” of knowing, willing and feeling in psychology. After several decades of narrowly focusing on cognition, neuroscientists have come to see that, in addition to cognitive science, there is a need for a “volitional” and “affective” neuroscience – in other words, knowing, willing, and feeling.
[ix] Bloom, H., Global Brain, p. 36.
[x] Darby, J., Intelligence in Nature, p. 60.
[xi] Blakeslee, S., Minds of Their Own.
[xii] Darby, J., Intelligence in Nature, p. 159.
[xiii] Glenn, D., Sharing the World with Thinking Animals, at http://www.animalsvoice.com/PAGES/writes/intros/sentience.html.
[xiv] Information on Koko is available at www.koko.org.
[xv] Some biologists speak of “culture” as beginning with birds and mammals, who, like primates, are capable of passing along acquired knowledge to their young.
[xvi] Or as Piaget would say, it has become decentered. Piaget did not explicitly describe decentering as involving a shift of attention. We have based our interpretation of Piaget’s work on the writings of psychologist Robert Kegan. See Chapter One, The Unrecognized Genius of Jean Piaget, in The Evolving Self.
[xvii] Kegan, R., The Evolving Self, 30.
[xviii] Ibid., p. 79.
[xix] Ibid., p. 79.
[xx] Ibid., p. 80.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 80.
[xxii] Ibid., p. 81.
[xxiii] Ibid., pp. 88-89.
[xxiv] Ibid., pp. 89.
[xxv] The material in this section is based on Hayward, J., A Rdzogs-chen Buddhist Interpretation of the Sense of Self.
[xxvi] James, W., in Mangan, B., Sensation's Ghost, at http://psyche.consciousness.monash.edu.au/v7/psyche-7-18-mangan.html.
[xxvii] See Allan Combs’ The Radiance of Being for an extensive discussion of the application of complexity and chaos theory to the evolution of consciousness and the possibility of inner freedom.
Book I, Part II, Chapter 3: The View From Nowhere (page numbers)
